Camp Bay #2 - with a jetty!
This photo was taken from the beach at Camp Bay in the 1920s. (Actually it is undated but a companion WA Taylor image below is labelled 'c. 1920' so I am making an assumption...).
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| Camp Bay, WA Taylor Collection, Canterbury Museum |
If you visit Camp Bay today this is what you will see...
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| Remains of the jetty from the beach, looking out to the Lyttelton Heads (Sam Yeatman) |
So what is the story behind the appearing and disappearing jetty? We know there was no jetty when Camp Bay was home to the Quarantine Station (see Camp Bay #1). Weary immigrants must have been landed on the beach in small boats; likewise bodies ferried for burial at Camp Bay from the later quarantine station at Ripapa Island. Having seen the easterly swells at Camp Bay I can imagine how challenging this might have been.
Once the quarantine station was moved to Ripapa Island, the land designated for that purpose became an education reserve – not for a school as such but to provide income for schools and the university. Purau farmer H. D. Gardiner took up the lease and transported by sea (there was no road) the best of the surviving barracks buildings to Purau for re-use as farm buildings.
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| Camp Bay in 1900, post-quarantine station and pre-jetty. The educational reserve and the cemetery reserve are marked. Archives NZ/ECan |
At the end of the First World War the government divided the education reserve into four blocks to provide farms for four returned servicemen. The two who drew blocks 1 and 4, facing onto Lyttelton Harbour, were Richard Candy and Cedric Smith (later Stapylton-Smith). [1]
The men had “no houses, no road, no wharf and few fences.” [2] The land was bare, dry and steep. Timber for two, small, two-roomed houses had to be landed on the beach and carried uphill. Not surprisingly, the men lobbied the Lyttelton Harbour Board for a jetty. The Harbour Board engineer estimated the cost of a jetty 100ft long, exclusive of a tee head, at about £250. Such a jetty would be “a great comfort and assistance to the returned soldiers who were settling in the neighbourhood of the bay, would add to the attraction of Lyttelton Harbour, and would make available to the public a historic spot used by the first settlers.” [3] While there had never been a jetty to facilitate the landing of quarantine station materials and inmates, the Harbour Board now agreed to build a wharf as speedily as possible and to more generous specifications than originally indicated.
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| Archives NZ/ECan |
The jetty was ready to go by December 1918. To complete the structure, men from the Public Works Department had to blast a cutting through heavy rock. In the hot, dry late summer of 1919, a spark from the blasting or a billy fire ignited the long grass. Fanned by a nor-wester, the flames raced up the hillside, eventually burning at least 2000 acres of pasture. [4] Dick Candy lost an estimated 1500 newly acquired sheep and all his grazing while Cedric Smith lost 170 sheep and most of his grazing. There was no grass left for the surviving stock meaning they had to be driven all the way to the Addington saleyards.
Candy and Smith persevered, gradually transforming their farms with fences, stockyards, farm buildings, trees, water-supply systems, a jointly-owned woolshed and, eventually, family houses. In the process they had to cope with “grass fires, floods, washouts, droughts, isolation and a precipitous terrain.” [5] One bonus was the construction of a clay road from Camp Bay to Purau in 1932. Until then, driving stock to the Addington Market had been a three-day marathon with stopovers at Charteris Bay and Governors Bay, followed by a final push over steep Dyers Pass. The road was cut by Depression relief workers, some based in Purau and others in Camp Bay, using picks, shovels, wheelbarrows and blasting powder. It was ‘narrow, steep and dangerous’ with no base core or shingle surface.
Even after the construction of the road...
Groceries still came from Lyttelton to Camp Bay by the service boat to the wharf (unless somebody forgot to bring them, which happened rather frequently and left housewives standing disconsolate on the wharf, as they might often do when a boy going to or coming from school in Christchurch was left standing either at Lyttelton or Camp Bay if the sea was too rough or the service boat didn’t run. [6]
The road was shingled in 1947. This meant that wool could finally be taken out by truck, rather than being hauled by horse-drawn sledge down to, and along, the jetty.
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| Camp Bay 1954, VC Browne & Son |
When the Signal Station at Little Port Cooper closed in 1949, Dick Candy purchased the 12 hectares from the Harbour Board. Several years later he sold the farm to Colin Acland who then onsold to Douglas McCready. In 1965, Cedric Smith’s son Paul and his partner Mary acquired the McCready farm meaning they were now the proprietors of all the farmland between Camp Bay and Little Port Cooper, stretching back to Mount Evans. Mary has documented the history of the farm and her experiences living there in books such as The Other End of the Harbour and Adderley to Bradley. Four years ago the farm was purchased by Sam Yeatman and Peter May who run Perendale sheep and Angus and Hereford cattle over the 305 hectares. They offer bed and breakfast accommodation in the lovely old 1930s Candy homestead right on the beach and have (re)opened up the old pack saddle and other walking tracks to Little Port Cooper for farm-stay guests and hikers.
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| The Candy homestead, built 1932 in an arts and crafts style (Sam Yeatman) |
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| Camp Bay homestead and remains of the jetty (Sam Yeatman) |
Heavy seas in early 1954 prompted an inspection of the jetty and a report to the Lyttelton Harbour Board. The sea had lifted about 50 decking planks and loosened a great many more. Most of the beams would require renewal; three 40ft piles would have to be replaced; the head of the jetty would need to be braced and about 15% of the decking would need renewing. Repairs were estimated to cost £1,274. [7] As always, the Harbour Board was reluctant to maintain a fading structure. A letter from the Mount Herbert County Council to the Harbour Board sealed the Camp Bay jetty’s fate.
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| Archives NZ/ECan |
An addendum to the Camp Bay jetty story. From 1876 until 1886 the spoil dredged to keep the harbour channels sufficiently deep was dumped in Little Port Cooper and Camp Bay. Then there was a respite until 1925 when the practice resumed. In those first 10 years, 14,346 barge-loads of spoil were deposited in the Camp Bay area – 3.66 million metric tonnes. [8] According to Gordon Ogilvie “the theory was that outgoing currents near the Heads took the mud out to sea, but without doubt much of this unlovely sediment stayed in the bays.” [9] The Harbour Board took regular soundings not only of the main channel depth but also to monitor what was happening in Camp Bay and Little Port Cooper. There is plenty of newspaper correspondence from the time indicating that the dumping of spoil was a contentious issue then, as it is now.
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| Lyttelton Harbour and Camp Bay soundings, March 1881, Archives NZ/ECan |
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| Camp Bay soundings, November 1913, Archives NZ/ECan |
[1] Gordon Ogilvie, Banks Peninsula, (Wellington: GP Publications), 64
[2] Ibid
[3] Star, 4 September 1918. No mention of the dismal circumstances and official neglect associated with the 'historic spot'
[3] Star, 4 September 1918. No mention of the dismal circumstances and official neglect associated with the 'historic spot'
[4] Press, 3 March 1919.
[5] Gordon Ogilvie, Place Names of Banks Peninsula and the Port Hills, (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press), 46
[6] Mary Stapylton-Smith, From Adderley to Bradley, (Friends of Diamond Harbour Library, 2009), 27
[7] Camp Bay jetty damage 1954, Archives NZ/ECan
[8 Gordon Ogilvie, Banks Peninsula, 64
[9] Ibid
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